Originally Posted by
jamar
Same thing here- if it's happening to everybody, then everybody can push their prices up. At some point, reduced cost burden (more cost pushed onto consumers) justifies reduced volume (higher prices driving lower-end customers away).
Precisely my point. A restaurant or a merchant would probably not raise their prices if credit card fraud hits them may be like one transaction every six months or so and maybe one store in a single city at that. At such a rate, it is a cost of doing business and the merchant would likely eat up the cost for the sake of letting consumers pay for their products with a credit card.
Now let's say that starts to happen more frequently to the level of five transactions EVERY MONTH and it starts affecting not only you, but practically every competitor out there within the city. If a problem exists that affects more frequently and that hits across an entire market, then there's no need to undercut the other guy to keep your market share, you need to start recuperating your losses and taking assumed risk because your competitors are probably making the same conclusion.
The threat of skim-cloned credit cards is indeed something that is happening more in America today which affects every merchant and their competitor out there. Same thing with rising fuel prices that hit all the airlines; it's a problem that affects the entire industry, inevitably they'll just pass the cost down to the consumer.